


A Fork in the Path Home

by aban_asaara



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Romance, Smut, Warden Carver Hawke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2019-10-06 05:37:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17339567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: Merrill and Carver make good use of what little time they have together.





	A Fork in the Path Home

**Author's Note:**

> [uchidachi](http://uchidachi.tumblr.com/) asked for “A kiss we had to wait for” for a rarepair of my choice, so I just had to go with Carver and Merrill. :D

Carver has gotten taller, somehow, and broader; elves may have built Merrill’s house, but before him none of Hawke’s shemlen friends had to bend forward to avoid knocking their forehead on the doorframe. His shoulders almost touch the frame when he steps inside, wearing his Grey Warden armour and the widest grin she’s ever seen and—Elgar’nan!—a _beard_ , and she’s not even certain it’s him until her name rumbles out of that wide chest of his. **  
**

Merrill jumps into his arms without thinking, then feels herself fly as he lifts her off the floor and spins her around before putting her back down like she weighed nothing. She laughs as she staggers on her feet, breathless.

He catches her by the arm to steady her. “Sorry, it’s just—it’s good to see you again, Merrill.” He breaks into another grin, a bright half-moon that sends his eyes shining, and that’s already twice as many as she’s seen him give in the year before the Order took him.

“You look well, Carver,” Merrill says, then points to his chin. “Can I—touch it? I’ve never touched a beard before.”

“By all means,” he laughs as she reaches up to scratch the cropped hairs on his chin. It’s—coarser than she expected. “Still a work in progress, though. Do you like it?” he asks, rubbing his chin and upper lip.

“I—think so, yes. It makes you look very … very human.”

He laughs, balancing his battle axe against the wall. “Well, better than the alternative, I suppose.”

Everything in her house looks small with him in it. For a moment she thinks, wildly, that the chair will collapse right under his weight as he sits at her table, but it holds despite a creak of protest. He unstraps his plated gauntlets while she puts a kettle on the stove and arranges a few hearth cakes on a plate, praying to Sylaise that they’re not stale.

“Those are delicious,” he says around a mouthful, then dusts the crumbs off his beard as he tells her of Weisshaupt and the Anderfels, of the desolate landscape there, all in broken, jagged cliffs and crags, of the cold nights that bite, warded off by laughter and ale and tales from all over. He has another tattoo now, a griffon, he tells her with no small pride.

He thinks he’s found his place, out of his sister’s glorious, golden shadow.

The kettle whistles. She pours the steaming water over honeybush leaves and pieces of dried orange rind, rummages through her cupboard for a mug that isn’t chipped or crazed.

“Your mirror,” Carver blurts out. “It’s gone.”

Merrill looks over to the spot where the Eluvian used to stand, before she ran her staff through the glass, before Hawke and Varric disposed of the pieces while she held her knees to her chest. The Carver she remembers would have said something just to fill the silence, but now he waits, patient, until she speaks: “I couldn’t fix it myself,” she starts, “and a—a demon offered his help. I took precautions, but Mahariel—my Keeper—she—” Her voice dies at the back of her mouth, and underneath the wound is raw, held closed by still-fragile threads of half-mended flesh that threaten to snap.

“I’m sorry. Say no more if you’d rather not.”

She takes a breath to unknot her throat and blinks the sting out of her eyes, glad to have his back to him. “I think she tried to drive the demon away before I could get there, but she ended up getting possessed instead,” she continues once she’s regained her composure, carrying the two mugs of tea to the table. “Everyone had been telling me for years what a fool’s errand it was, and I didn’t see it until—until I killed her.”

The last few words draw a crease between his eyebrows. “Merrill, you didn’t _kill_ her. You couldn’t have known.”

She stares down at his hands, too large for the mug. She thinks of Master Ilen, somehow, of the little toy halla he would carve for the clan’s children. “Didn’t I? If not for me, she’d still be alive.”

He blows on the plume of steam rising from his mug before taking a careful sip. “You know, I used to blame everything on someone else. My sister, most of the time. It was easier than admitting that I could change things. That maybe it was my own fault. And if I’ve learned anything now, it’s that everyone’s responsible for their own actions. Same goes for you, and your Keeper.” He shrugs. “Alright, so maybe restoring the mirror didn’t work out, but confronting the demon was her decision, not yours. You said yourself you took precautions.”

She raises her face to look at him. If she tries hard enough she can still see the broody young lad who would argue with Hawke for the mere sake of it, who would lament his fate and blame it on the Amells and his sisters and Kirkwallers and mages, but now— “You’ve changed,” she says.

Carver runs a hand through his hair. “I, uh. Let’s say that the Order has changed my view on a great many things. We have to do whatever it takes to stop the Blight and the ‘spawn, and sometimes that means—well. Things that wouldn’t sit well with the common folk, I reckon. We even have a couple of blood mages in our ranks, and they can handle themselves. You made it easier for me to accept them, I have to say.” He sighs, and the steam of his mug parts, swirling around his breath. “Truth be told, I’ve been thinking a lot about you,” he finishes, his voice nearly lost in the soft white plumes.

Warmth rushes to her cheeks, and not only from the heat rolling off her cup of tea. An ache blooms somewhere under her breast, both tender and sweet, the same that Hawke used to stir when she would lean close, smelling of leather and roses, and Mahariel before her, smelling of earth and blood and wild berries.

And suddenly she’s tired—tired of things passing her by, wind-swift then gone, tired of closing her hand only to find naught upon her palm. Before she knows it, she’s standing between his thighs, fingers curled around his short, rounded ears, and pressing her lips to his.

His breath hitches under her mouth, but he doesn’t question it; instead he melts into the kiss as though he’d been waiting for it—and he was, she supposes, because now she knows for what it is the heaviness that weighs down his gaze when it sweeps her, the heat that guides his hands around her waist as he pulls her to him. He has a scent all his own, she finds out, like sun-warm metal and dusty roads and sea salt, and he tastes like honeyed tea and oranges, like the cloves and nutmeg of the hearth cakes.

Clinging to his shoulders, she throws one leg over his thigh, then the other, and straddles him without breaking the seal of their mouths. The plate and studs of his armour are rough and ragged through the thin cotton of her trousers. His grip is firm, strong, his fingers sneaking under the hem of her shirt to caress the small of her back. She tilts her head back so that his mouth falls on her throat where her heart pulses, and he moans, a low, deep sound that rumbles down her neck and fans out between her parted legs.

“Merrill,” he pants, blue eyes glazed under the furrow of his brow, “you know I have to return to Weisshaupt after this.”

“I know,” she says, simply, because there’s nothing else to say.

He rises to his feet then, holding her to himself while she hooks her legs around his waist, and carries her to the small cot in the adjacent room. It takes seconds for her trousers and shirt to be swept off and dropped to the floor, but his armour has to be peeled off layer by layer, buckles and leather straps uncovering laces and clasps. His chestpiece clangs to the floor, followed by his plated tassets, his chainmail and leathers, and finally he kicks off his boots to crouch between her legs, the bed groaning under his weight.

His skin nearly burns as she trails her fingertips along the mabari tattooed on his chest and the raised scars on his shoulder blades, but hotter yet is his mouth, chasing the warmth of his breath on the taper of her ear, her neck, the tips of her breasts. Her insides clench in anticipation under the strained laces of his trousers when his teeth graze her nipple as it tightens between his lips. He takes his time, kissing each rib, swirling his tongue around her navel, sucking on a hipbone on his way down to her center. Her legs part as his tongue brushes the knot of flesh atop her entrance, sending a ripple of warmth through her, and then he starts kissing and licking until she has both of her hands threaded in his hair and can’t help the cries that pour out of her mouth, until she surrenders to the wave of pleasure cresting over her with a great shudder.

Carver is grinning at her when she looks down her heaving breasts, tugging the laces of his trousers loose. “I’d say I must be dreaming,” he starts, his cock hot and hard on the inside of her thigh, where the scratch of his beard left a pleasant burn, “but Grey Warden dreams aren’t anywhere this pleasant, usually.”

“And neither are blood mage dreams, so this isn’t one of my dreams either,” she replies, giggling.

Carver kisses her again, his lips slick with her arousal. She throws her legs around his hips to welcome him inside her, and goes soft in his arms when he stretches her open and fills her up. He slips one hand under her body, almost lifting her up the bed to draw her even closer until she can’t even tell where one starts and the other ends. Then he starts sliding back and forth inside her, slowly at first, and faster, and faster, watching her face for tells, shifting his hips when she bites her lip and thrusting deeper when she arches under him. Before long, heat is coiling up inside her again, taut as the bowstrings of her clan’s hunters. At last it comes loose with a twang that reverberates to the very tip of her toes and makes them curl in pleasure, and she pulses around his cock, pulling him over the edge soon after her.

It takes some effort to lift her eyelids once she’s returned to her senses. Carver is above her, bright-eyed and flushed, his heart hammering against hers. “Maker’s breath, Merrill,” he sighs, his voice hoarse and thick as he brushes her cheek with his thumb, “you make me wish I could stay.”

And Creators, but she will miss the weight of his hips against hers, the twitch of his cock deep inside her, even the itch of his beard on her neck. “It’s alright,” she whispers, running her fingers along the outline of the griffon inked on his shoulder. “You have a whole world to keep safe.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
